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Minecraft surpasses 500K sales, Persson explains how he did it
According to the official Minecraft stats page, more than 500,000 of the nearly 1.6 million registered players have already purchased a license for the game, which is still in the alpha phase of development. That's pretty much unprecedented in the history of game development -- certainly indie game development -- and perhaps only comparable to a big-budget marketing effort; one that might secure those kinda pre-release purchase numbers through pre-orders and offer a limited "beta" trial of the game through a highly-controlled channel. So, yeah, Minecraft's "alpha stage" success is unprecedented. Is it just luck? The one-man mastermind behind it all, Markus Perrson, doesn't think so. "I think originality and easy access is much more important than luck," he told Develop in a recent interview. "If you make a game that's genuinely good, and it's relatively unique, you can get a lot potential customers. If you make sure they don't have to jump through too many loops to play or even pay for the game, you can convert those into actual customers." Currently, almost 60 percent of Minecraft users are playing for free.
Minecraft to get portals between servers, eventually
Minecraft maestro Markus Persson recently updated his blog with a progress report on his new studio, Mojang Specifications, and news about the upcoming Halloween update for the game. He notes that Mojang has found a building and now includes six employees: three programmers, a pixel artist, a CEO and a business developer. As for the Halloween update, Persson says it will include six new block types, five of which have "unique abilities." There will also be a new monster, "a new dimension" and portals. Persson explained later in a tweet that these portals will eventually be able to link between different Minecraft servers, though this functionality won't be implemented anytime soon. So, can monsters use portals? If so, we totally would not build a transdimensional monster funnel leading directly inside of another player's meticulously crafted fortress. So, feel free to invite us to a game and leave us alone in the back room for a few minutes ... okay?
Craft your own Minecraft papercraft crafts
If you just can't get enough Minecraft -- and, let's face it, you can't -- then these adorable papercraft models are for you! As an added bonus, the models are so simple and boxy that there's no way you'll super glue your fingers together trying to make a stupid, impossible-to-build Companion Cube. [Image credit: jumbso]
Anti-Aliased: How I mine for craft
This column was bound to come sometime. We've had legions of people asking us, "Why don't you cover Minecraft? It's totally an MMO!" The email barrage was so constant that I had nightmarish fits in my sleep, where I was drowning in oddly block-shaped emails pouring out of my ceiling. Now, after I've finally played Minecraft, my nightmarish fits have turned into scenes in which I'm being attacked by giant block-shaped spiders, but that's neither here nor there. I can see why people have fallen in love with this game, and they have every reason to. Minecraft may not be an MMO by our standards, but it is an example of gaming done right. It's the purest form of everything we love about gaming, and it's a game that could teach MMO makers a lot about design, should they care to listen.
